Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Tuesday May 01, 2012 @02:06AM
from the iHippies-guilt-over-worker-abuses-assuaged dept.

1sockchuck writes "Apple's North Carolina data center will tap landfills for biogas, which will then be converted into electricity using fuel cells from Bloom Energy. The 24 'Bloom boxes' will have a capacity of 4.8 megawatts of power, and along with a large solar array, will provide Apple with a significant on-site generation of sustainable energy. Microsoft is also developing biogas-powered data plants where modular data centers will be housed near water treatment plants and landfills. GigaOm has a useful primer on biogas in data centers, as well as video of the new higher capacity Bloom boxes that will support Apple's server farm."

You peeked!Apples new data center features office chairs that look amazingly like a cross between an iMac and a toilet. Apple thinks different and it shows,when they capture every bit of flattus. Not only that but each iCubicle will have a belch vent. Cattle were actually the inspiration and have been if you've noticed the iPhone/iPad factorys.Apple gives to their employees and expects them to give back. You realize they bar-b-q at lunch breaks, right? Mounds of baked beans, greasy burgers, bratwurst, Cole

Each standard def movie is around a gig of data. High def can be several times that. Add up music and apps and you might be shocked how much data Apple transports through their data centers. On top of that there's the OS and other Apple software from their non handheld app store. There is also their on line storage of data and other services. The Apple data centers transfer massive amounts of data so using renewable sources is a very good thing. Most of Amazon's business is physical not digital where as iTunes is all digital. Google is pure on-line so they eat a lot of bandwidth. I say good for Apple for trying to offset energy usage with more sustainable sources.

Our company has several Bloom boxes. Natural gas in, electricity out. They're -very- noisy, and you can can see soot forming around exhaust vents on the top. Are they really fuel cells, or...gas turbine generators? Gas-fired boiler heats H2O to steam, pushes it through a turbine mechanical generator, H2O condenses. This would explain the noise and the soot.

As I understand it, they use heat and catalysts? to crack methane into hydrogen and carbon monoxide? use the hydrogen to produce electricity, like any fuel cell, and burn the carbon monoxide to discharge carbon dioxide and heat. I may have the details wrong, though, they don't tend to publish technical information in these types of stories.

How long will it take, until they don't get enough waste and will turn to that "green" alternative of turning maize into gas, which is even more effective than their current plans. That's at least what the greenies in Germany do. Who cares about feeding the world, if you can be green?

Let's see how long it takes you to realize, that the maize is specific for biogas. You basically need maize for biogas to maximize gas-yielt. But that you plant any other food (e.g. wheat) on the same fields you plant your maize for biogas (or bio ethanol for that matter).

They might be really trying to use this for some power, but its more likely just for show. I'm sure at the first sign of trouble the jump to the utility or diesel generators. I don't understand why companies are dumping so much money into new and possibly unreliable tech for a data center they want 100% up time on. They would be better off, using low power lighting and better cooling tech, and other low power solutions. Think about how much extra equipment they have to buy and maintan, On top of the industr

Burning biogas is indeed not new, but causes the need for maintenance on most generators. This is due to the fact the fuel is not cleaned before being burned. Causing the intake runners on the generators to need to be removed and descaled bi-weekly. It has also been found this by-product contained high levels of arsenic.

1. They are almost certainly connected to the grid. Just like residential solar cells, a building can be BOTH connected to the grid AND have on-site renewable generation.

2. Apple is paying the industrial retail rate for electricity, not the cost the utility would pay. Sure, PV and biogas might not be purely economic for the utility in 2012, but they may well be for Apple because Apple's avoided cost is so much higher than the utility's.

3. North Carolina has an RPS -- a Renewable Portfolio Standard. Most states do. The utilities are required to purchase enough certificates so that X% of their retail sales have accompanying certificates, each of which represents 1 MWh of renewably-produced electricity. Apple's equipment will generate these, and Apple will sell them on the market to the utilities, generating even more revenue.

4. Low power lighting and better cooling tech are not mutually exclusive to renewable energy. You can bet that Apple is *also* employing technology which lowers their consumption of electricity for both lighting and cooling.

Apple isn't getting rich on this stuff. They're not getting rich on the vending machines in the break rooms either. It doesn't mean that they're relying on them for critical business purposes, and it doesn't mean they're taking a loss on them. In fact, it's almost certainly the contrary -- this will in no way reduce their data center reliability, and it will result in slightly lower costs than just relying on grid electricity.

3. North Carolina has an RPS -- a Renewable Portfolio Standard. Most states do. The utilities are required to purchase enough certificates so that X% of their retail sales have accompanying certificates, each of which represents 1 MWh of renewably-produced electricity. Apple's equipment will generate these, and Apple will sell them on the market to the utilities, generating even more revenue.
Trust me this is not a profitable venture.
You are missing the point. What I am saying is apple is doing this beca

Sure, bio-gas, solar panels, it all sounds great. But, it's not like we are growing this stuff on trees. It would be interesting to know if someone were to determine the actual cost of mining the earth -which in a way we do for fossil fuels- for the rare-earth metals for solar cells, high-power magnets, and the like. It might seem like a good idea now but how long until we have mowed down all the mountains?

We actually are mowing down the mountains in nearby West Virginia for coal. The coal extraction technique is called "mountaintop removal". Google it -- it ain't pretty. Mining the material for PV or bloom boxes doesn't have anywhere near that kind of impact, in part because the material is part of the generator, not part of the fuel.

This stuff is replacing the need for coal, and coal is what the mowing down of mountains is all about.

Even if these produce twice much power as the previous generation, as the article claims, that's still probably about $4.00/Watt. If it's 60% efficient, like he claims, that's equivalent to a combined cycle plant, which typically will cost about $0.50/Watt. Why would you pay 8 times more for this? Is there any benefit?

Could be to try and push the research forward. Things are expensive in the early days, funding helps make them cheaper. Could also be for appearances, a "Look how green we are," kind of thing. Appearances are valuable to advertising and so the money spent might be well worth it.

However the real answer probably lies in the post of another user: Al Gore is a partner/owner of these companies, and he sits on the board of Apple. That would be human politics as fairly normal. A board member says "Hey we should us

Nobody with any sense would pay 8 times more for this for no possible benefit. Natural gas has never been cheaper. NC has a surplus of energy and remarkably low energy prices already, and sensible conservation measures, such as installing high efficiency air conditioners, are already lowering consumption (and prices) further still. If Apple shareholders had any sense, they would sue the company for pissing away their money on political grandstanding. It isn't even about carbon -- I'm sitting about 15 mi

"5 million years ago the Earth was roughly 2 C warmer than it is today, CO_2 levels were in excess of what they are expected to go to by the end of the century in the worst case "anthropogenic" scenario"

"The last time carbon dioxide levels were apparently as high as they are today — and were sustained at those levels — global temperatures were 5 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit higher than they are today, the sea level wa

First of all, enjoy a good chuckle at the term 'Biogas'. Most literature refers to it as 'Landfill gas' and the majority of landfill locations think of it as a waste product to be disposed of as cheaply as possible, mostly through flaring operations. The term 'Biogas' was invented by someone that that wanted to game California's renewable energy programs.

As a fuel, it's marginal, having about 500 BTU per standard cubic foot of gas. Most sources are 10% nitrogen, 40% CO2, 45% methane and the balance oxygen, H2S, water, ethane, ect. The energy cost to clean the gas up to the point where something as high tech as a Bloom Box can use it can reach 60% of the energy of the entire gas stream, as water and CO2 removal are both energy expensive operations.

Still, with all it's disadvantages, I hope Apple is able to make the system work reliably, if only because it's a hard engineering problem they are tackling. And it will be a good proof-of-practicality for the Bloom Boxes.

"Biogas" usually meant from sewage/manure processing until the landfill gas promoters appropriated the term. But putting such boxes at datacentres makes no sense: it wastes the heat they produce. After all, if there's one thing a datacentre doesn't need, it's more low-grade heat. Instead, they should put them someplace where the heat can be sold even in midsummer, and then connect to the datacentre via private wire (if the grid isn't reliable enough for them).